29 March, 2017

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Date of Publication: 29 March, 2017

New professions, just like new businesses, can benefit a lot from a good elevator pitch. What’s a manager’s job? What does a sales specialist do? Everybody can tell you that. When it comes to UX designers - one of the most requested new jobs on the market, regardless of the industry - the question becomes a little tricky. What is UX, in the first place? And is “design” that Photoshop job of putting fancy colours in? Not exactly - and we’re here to find out.

What is UX Design?

UX itself is an unusual acronym, standing for User eXperience.

Designing for user experience means putting at the core the thoughts and emotions of your target audience, keeping in mind when they’re using your product or service - and why.

It’s a complex process, usually starting from behaviour research, based on the so-called “design thinking” - the good old designer’s habit of thinking out problems before jumping to solutions.

After research comes the design part. For some industries it’s service design (i.e. laying out guidelines for shop assistants or scripting sales and customer care calls), for others it involves a proper user interface layout.

Where can you learn UX?

UX was a pioneering field until not long ago. In many ways it still is, but there are now academic courses and full degrees focused on it. No need for a formal education in UX Design to be a good UX designer, though.

Specialists in the user research part mostly come from a variety of psychology backgrounds, while a lot of interface and interaction designers are former art directors who took an interest in a user-centered way of solving issues.

A solid UX Design team is always made of both designers and researchers, together applying their craft and mutually learning each others’ approach.

For some, UX Design is nothing but that: an approach.

And one that can be applied not only to products and services but to whole businesses, too. That’s what Davide Casali, design leader at Automattic, calls “the shift”: expert UX designers can level up to full business consultants, who help executives define their goals and design the very way of reaching them.